Untraveled, naive, even a little callow, we are not surprised to discover the heart of a hero just waiting to be stirred to action.
As a nickname the term "agnostic" was soon misused to cover any and every variation of scepticism, and just as popular preachers confused it with atheism in their denunciations, so the callow freethinker - following Tennyson's path of "honest doubt" - classed himself with the agnostics, even while he combined an instinctively Christian theism with a facile rejection of the historical evidences for Christianity.